Year 1 of Trump’s Immigration Crackdown: ICE Raids, Deportations and Protests

Year 1 of President Trump’s quest to conduct the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history turned towns and cities into battlegrounds. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Todd Heisler/The New York Times Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In One Year, Trump’s War on Immigration Alters the Face of America The crackdown and detentions swept from one coast to the other: day laborers in Los Angeles, a flower seller in Chicago, immigrants in New York courtrooms. From Texas and New Mexico to Illinois and New York, a New York Times reporter and photographer spent the year documenting Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In just 11 months, about 500,000 people would be deported in an unrelenting campaign celebrated by those who saw it as long overdue and lamented by those who saw it as inhumane.

Over the year, the deportations forced Americans, even those who welcomed the stepped-up enforcement, to reckon with the human consequences of rounding up and expelling people from their streets.

Homes were emptied. Families were splintered. Neighborhoods were subdued.

The immigration crackdown came to a Brooklyn street when a Guatemalan man was picked up by ICE agents looking for someone else.

In the kitchen of a buzzy Manhattan pub and bistro, where a Guatemalan line cook stopped showing up, a chef was left scrambling for answers.

Electric bicycles littered sidewalks in Chicago and Washington after the riders were detained while making deliveries.

In the New York suburbs, Maria Priego huddled for dinner with her four children, leaving empty the chair where her husband, Alejandro Juarez, had sat every night before he was deported to Mexico after 20 years in the United States. Todd Heisler/The New York Times Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. Trump, catapulted back to the White House by voters whose views had shifted sharply against illegal immigration, was making good on his campaign promise to enforce immigration laws to their fullest extent.

Americans were confronted with a swelling deportation force that, under pressure to meet arrest quotas, traded targeted raids for sweeps that critics saw as indiscriminate and supporters as vital.

Protesters clashed with armed agents as the dragnet widened, sweeping up recent and longtime immigrants, those with criminal records and many without.

The all-of-government effort was stunning, an abrupt pendulum swing for a country that had just absorbed a record influx of migrants during the Biden era, overwhelming cities, souring voters and f